The Signature of All Things: A Novel

Chapter Twenty-one

Alma sailed for Tahiti on the thirteenth day of November, 1851.

The Crystal Palace had just been erected in London for the Great Exhibition. Foucault’s pendulum was newly installed at the Paris Observatory. The first white man had recently glimpsed Yosemite Valley. A submarine telegraph cable was spooling across the Atlantic Ocean. John James Audubon was dead of old age; Richard Owen won the Copley Medal for his work on paleontology; the Female Medical College of Pennsylvania was about to graduate its first class of eight women doctors; and Alma Whittaker—aged fifty-one years—was a paying passenger on a whaling ship headed for the South Seas.

She sailed without a maid, without a friend, without a guide. Hanneke de Groot had wept on Alma’s neck at the news she was leaving, but had quickly regained her senses and commissioned for Alma a collection of practical garments, including two specially made travel dresses: humble frocks of linen and wool, with reinforced buttons (not much different from what Hanneke had always worn), which Alma could tend without assistance. So attired, Alma rather resembled a servant herself, but she was exceedingly comfortable and could move about with ease. She wondered why she had not dressed this way her entire life. Once the travel dresses were completed, Alma instructed Hanneke to sew secret compartments into the hems of two of the dresses, which Alma used to conceal the gold and silver coins she would need to pay for her travels. These coins constituted a large portion of Alma’s remaining wealth in the world. It was not a fortune by any means, but it was enough—Alma dearly hoped—to sustain a frugal traveler for two or three years.

“You have been always so kind to me,” Alma said to Hanneke, when the dresses were presented.

“Well, I shall miss you,” Hanneke replied, “and I shall cry again when you go, but let us admit to it, child—we are both of us too old now to fear the great changes of life.”

Prudence presented Alma with a commemorative bracelet, braided from strands of Prudence’s own hair (still as pale and beautiful as sugar) together with strands of Hanneke’s hair (gray as polished steel). Prudence knotted the bracelet herself onto Alma’s wrist, and Alma promised never to remove it.

“I could not think of a more precious gift,” Alma said, and she meant it.

Immediately upon making her decision to go to Tahiti, Alma had penned a letter to the missionary in Matavai Bay, the Reverend Francis Welles, alerting him that she would be coming for an indefinite period of time. She knew there was a strong chance she would arrive at Papeete before her letter did, but there was nothing to be done for it. She needed to sail before winter set in. She did not want to wait so long that she changed her mind. She could only hope that when she arrived in Tahiti, there would be a place for her to stay.

It took her three weeks to pack. She knew precisely what to take, as she had been instructing botanical collectors for decades on the subject of safe and useful travel. Thus, she packed arsenical soap, cobbler’s wax, twine, camphor, forceps, cork, insect boxes, a plant press, several waterproof Indian rubber bags, two dozen durable pencils, three bottles of India ink, a tin of watercolor pigments, brushes, pins, nets, lenses, putty, brass wire, small scalpels, washing flannels, silk thread, a medical kit, and twenty-five reams of paper (blotting, writing, plain brown). She considered bringing a gun, but as she was not an expert shot, she decided that a scalpel would have to do at close range.

She heard her father’s voice as she prepared, remembering all the times she had taken dictation for him, or had overheard him instructing young botanists. Be wakeful and watchful, she heard Henry say. Make sure you are not the only member of your party who can write or read a letter. If you need to find water, follow a dog. If you are starving, eat insects before you waste your energy on hunting. Anything that a bird can eat, you can eat. Your biggest dangers are not snakes, lions, or cannibals; your biggest dangers are blistered feet, carelessness, and fatigue. Be certain to write your diaries and maps legibly; if you die, your notes may be of use to a future explorer. In an emergency, you can always write in blood.

Alma knew to wear light colors in the tropics in order to stay cool. She knew that soapsuds worked into fabric and dried overnight would waterproof clothing perfectly. She knew to wear flannel next to the skin. She knew that it would be appreciated if she took gifts for both the missionaries (recent newspapers, vegetable seeds, quinine, hand axes, and glass bottles) and the natives (calico, buttons, mirrors, and ribbon). She packed one of her beloved microscopes—the lightest one—though she much feared it would be destroyed on the journey. She packed a gleaming new chronometer and a smallish traveling thermometer.

All of this, she loaded into trunks and wooden boxes (cushioned lovingly with dried moss) which she then stacked into a small pyramid just outside the carriage house. Alma felt a quiver of panic when she saw her life’s essentials reduced to such a minimal pile. How could she survive with so little? What would she do without her library? Without her herbarium? How would it feel to wait sometimes six months for news of family, or of science? What if the ship should sink, and all these essentials be lost? She felt a sudden sympathy for all the intrepid young men the Whittakers had sent out on collecting expeditions in the past—for the fear and uncertainty they must have felt, even as they purported to be confident. Some of those young men had never been heard from again.

In her preparations and packing, Alma made certain to give herself every appearance of a botaniste voyageuse, but the truth was, she was not going to Tahiti to search for plants. Her actual motive could be found in one item, buried at the bottom of one of the larger boxes: Ambrose’s leather valise, buckled securely, and filled with the drawings of the nude Tahitian boy. She intended to look for that boy (whom she had come to refer to in her mind as The Boy) and she was certain that she could find him. She intended to search for The Boy across the entire island of Tahiti if necessary, searching for him almost botanically, as though he were a rare orchid specimen. She would recognize him as soon as she saw him, she plainly knew. She would know that face till the end of her days. Ambrose had been a brilliant artist, after all, and the features were so vividly depicted. It was as if Ambrose had left her a map, and now she was following it.

She did not know what she would do with The Boy once she had found him. But she would find him.

Alma took the train to Boston, spent three nights in an inexpensive harbor hotel (redolent of gin, tobacco, and the sweat of former guests) and then embarked from there. Her ship was the Elliot—a 120-foot whaler, broad and sturdy as an old mare—heading to the Marquesas Islands for the dozenth time since she had been built. The captain had agreed, for a handsome fee, to sail 850 miles out of his way and deliver Alma to Tahiti.

The captain was a Mr. Terrence, out of Nantucket. He was a sailor much admired by Dick Yancey, who had secured Alma her place on his vessel. Mr. Terrence was as hard as a captain should be, Yancey promised, and he enforced better discipline in his men than most. Terrence was known more for being daring than careful (he was famous for raising his canvases in a storm, rather than subtracting them, in the hopes of gaining speed from the gales), but he was a religious man and a sober one, who strove for a high moral tone at sea. Dick Yancey trusted him and had sailed with him many times. Dick Yancey, who was always in a hurry, preferred captains who sailed fast and fearlessly, and Terrence was just such a type.

Alma had never before been on a ship. Or, rather, she had been on many ships, when she used to go with her father down to the docks of Philadelphia to inspect arriving cargo, but she had never sailed on a ship before. When the Elliot pulled out of its slip, she stood on the deck with her heart drumming as though to burst from her chest. She watched as the last of the dock’s piles were ahead of her, and then—with breathtaking swiftness—were suddenly behind her. Then they were flying across the great Boston harbor, with smaller fishing boats bobbing in their wake. By the close of the afternoon, Alma was on the open ocean for the first time in her life.

“I will pay you every service in my power to make you comfortable on this voyage,” Captain Terrence had sworn to Alma when first she boarded. She appreciated his solicitousness, but it soon became clear there was not much that would be comfortable about this journey. Her berth, right next to the captain’s stateroom, was small and dark, and reeked of sewage. The drinking water smelled of a pond. The ship was carrying a cargo of mules to New Orleans, and the animals were unrelenting in their complaints. The food was both unpleasant and binding (turnips and salt biscuits for breakfast; dried beef and onions for dinner) and the weather was, at best, an uncertain affair. For the first three weeks of the journey she did not once see the sun. Immediately, the Elliot encountered gales that broke crockery and knocked sailors about at a most remarkable rate. She sometimes had to tie herself to the captain’s table in order to eat her dried beef and onions in safety. She ate it gallantly, though, and without complaint.

There was not another woman on board, nor an educated man. The sailors played cards long into the night, laughing and shouting and keeping her awake. Sometimes the men danced on the deck like spirits possessed, until Captain Terrence threatened to break their fiddles if they did not stop. They were all rough sorts, aboard the Elliot. One of the sailors caught a hawk off the coast of North Carolina, cut its wings, and watched it hop across the deck, for sport. Alma found this barbaric, but she said nothing. The next day, the sailors, bored and distracted, staged a wedding between two mules, decorating the animals in festive paper collars for the event. There was a fine ruckus of hooting and yelling. The captain let it happen; he saw no harm in it (perhaps, Alma thought, because it was a Christian wedding). Alma had never before in her life seen the likes of such behavior.

There was nobody for Alma to speak to of serious matters, so she decided to stop speaking of serious matters. She resolved to be of good cheer and to make simple conversation with everyone. She vowed to make no enemies. As they would all be at sea together for the next five to seven months, this looked to be a sensible strategy. She even allowed herself to laugh at jests, so long as the men were not too coarse. She did not worry about coming to harm; Captain Terrence would not permit familiarity, and the men displayed no licentiousness toward Alma. (This did not surprise her. If men had not been interested in Alma at nineteen years, surely none would take notice of her at fifty-one.)

Her closest companion was the small monkey that Captain Terrence kept as a pet. His name was Little Nick, and he would sit with Alma for hours, picking over her gently, always looking for new and odd things. He had a most intelligent and curious disposition. More than anything, the monkey was fascinated by the woven-hair bracelet that Alma wore around her wrist. He could never get over his perplexion that there was not a similar bracelet on her other wrist—although every morning he checked to see if a bracelet had grown there during the night. Then he would sigh and give Alma a resigned look, as though to say, “Why can you not just once be symmetrical?” Over time, Alma learned to share her snuff with Little Nick. He would daintily place a crumb of it in one of his nostrils, sneeze cleansingly, and then fall asleep in her lap. She did not know what she would have done without his company.

They rounded the tip of Florida and stopped in New Orleans to deliver the mules. Nobody mourned to see the mules go. In New Orleans, Alma saw the most extraordinary fog over Lake Pontchartrain. She saw bales of cotton and casks of cane sugar piled on the wharfs, awaiting shipment. She saw steamboats lined up in rows, as far as the eye could see, waiting to paddle up the Mississippi. She found good use for her French in New Orleans, though the accent was confusing. She admired the little houses with their gardens of seashells and clipped shrubbery, and she was dazzled by the women with their elaborate fashions. She wished she had more time for exploration, but was all too soon ordered back on board.

Southward they sailed along the coast of Mexico. An outbreak of fever swept the ship. Scarcely anyone escaped it. There was a doctor on board, but he was more than useless, and so Alma soon found herself dispensing treatments from her own precious cache of purgatives and emetics. She did not think of herself as much of a nurse, but she was a fairly capable pharmacist, and her assistance won her a small group of admirers.

Soon Alma herself fell ill, and was forced to keep to her berth. Her fevers gave her distant dreams and vivid fears. She could not keep her hands away from her quim, and woke in paroxysms of both pain and pleasure. She dreamed constantly of Ambrose. She had been making a heroic effort not to think of him, but the fever weakened the fortress of her mind, and his memory forced itself in—but distorted horribly. In her dreams, she saw him in the bathtub—just as she had seen him, nude, that one afternoon—but now his penis grew beautiful and erect, and he grinned at her lecherously while bidding her to suck him until she choked for breath. In other dreams, she watched Ambrose drown in the bathtub, and she woke in a panic, feeling certain she had murdered him. She heard his voice one night whispering, “So now you are the child and I am the mother,” and she woke with a scream, arms flailing. But nobody was there. His voice had been in German. Why would it be in German? What did it mean? She lay awake the rest of the night, struggling to comprehend the word mother—Mutter, in German—a word that, in alchemy, also meant “crucible.” She could make no sense of the dream, but it felt most heavily like a curse.

She had her first thoughts of regret about attempting this journey.

The day after Christmas, one of the sailors died of the fever. He was wrapped in sailcloth, weighted with a cannonball, and slid quietly into the sea. The men took his death without any evident sign of grief, auctioning off his belongings among themselves. By evening, it was as if the man had never existed. Alma imagined her belongings auctioned off among these fellows. What would they make of Ambrose’s drawings? Who was to say? Perhaps such a trove of sodomitic sensuality would be valuable to some of these men. All types of men went to sea. Alma well knew this to be true.

Alma recovered from her sickness. A fair wind brought them to Rio de Janeiro, where Alma saw Portuguese slave ships bound north for Cuba. She saw beautiful beaches, where fishermen risked their lives on rafts that looked no sturdier than the roofs of henhouses. She saw the great fan palms, bigger than any in White Acre’s greenhouses, and wished to the point of agony that she could have shown them to Ambrose. She could not keep him from her thoughts. She wondered if he had seen these palms, too, when he had passed through here.

She kept herself distracted with inexhaustible walks of exploration. She saw women who wore no bonnets, and who smoked cigars as they walked down the street. She saw refugees, commercial men, dirty Creoles and courtly Negroes, demi-savages and elegant quadroons. She saw men selling parrots and lizards for food. Alma feasted on oranges, lemons, and limes. She ate so many mangoes—sharing a few of them with Little Nick—that she broke out in a rash. She saw the horse races and the dancing amusements. She stayed at a hotel run by a mixed-raced couple—the first she had ever seen of such a thing. (The woman was a friendly, competent Negro, who did nothing slowly; the man was white and old, and did nothing at all.) Not a day went by that she did not see men marching slaves through the streets of Rio, offering these manacled beings for sale. Alma could not bear the sight of it. It left her sick with shame, for all the years that she had taken no notice of this abhorrence.

Back at sea, they headed for Cape Horn. As they approached the Cape, the weather became so unseasonably fierce that Alma—already wrapped in several layers of flannel and wool—added a man’s greatcoat and a borrowed Russian hat to her wardrobe. So bundled, she was now indistinguishable from any man on board. She saw the mountains of Tierra del Fuego, but the ship could not land, as the weather was too fierce. Fifteen days of misery followed as they rounded the Cape. The captain insisted on carrying all sail, and Alma could not imagine how the masts endured the strain. The ship lay first on one side, then the other. The Elliot herself seemed to scream in pain—her poor wooden soul beaten and whipped by the sea.

“If it is God’s will, we shall go clear,” Terrence said, refusing to lower the sails, trying to run out another twenty knots before darkness.

“But what if someone should be killed?” Alma shouted across the wind.

“Burial at sea,” the captain shouted back, and pushed on.

It was forty-five days of bitter cold after this. The waves came in endless, rolling assault. Sometimes the storms were so bad that the older sailors sang psalms for comfort. Others cursed and blustered, and a few remained silent—as though they were already dead. The storms loosened the hencoops from their stays, and sent chickens flying across the decks. One night, the boom was smashed into dainty chips, like kindling. The next day, the sailors tried to raise a new boom, and failed. One of the sailors, knocked over by a wave, fell down the hold and broke his ribs.

Alma hovered the entire time between hope and fear, certain she would die at any moment—but never once did she cry out in panic, or raise her voice in alarm. At the end of it all, when the weather cleared, Captain Terrence said, “You are a right little daughter of Neptune, Miss Whittaker,” and Alma felt she had never been so mightily praised.

Finally, in mid-March, they docked at Valparaiso, where the sailors found ample houses of prostitution in which to attend to their amorous wants, while Alma explored this elaborate and welcoming city. The area down by the port was a degenerate mudflat, but the houses along the steep hills were beautiful. She hiked the hills for days, and felt her legs grow strong again. She saw nearly as many Americans in Valparaiso as she’d seen in Boston—all of them en route to San Francisco to hunt for gold. She filled her belly with pears and cherries. She saw a religious procession half a mile long, for a saint who was unfamiliar to her, and she followed it all the way to a formidable cathedral. She read newspapers and sent letters home to Prudence and Hanneke. One clear and cool day, she climbed to the highest point of Valparaiso, and from there—in the far and hazy distance—she could see the snow-covered peaks of the Andes. She felt a deep bruise of absence for her father. This provided her with a strange relief—to miss Henry, and not, for once, Ambrose.

Then they sailed again, out into the broad waters of the Pacific. The days grew warm. The sailors became calm. They cleaned between the decks, and scrubbed away old mold and vomit. They hummed as they worked. In the mornings, in the bustle of activity, the ship felt like a small country village. Alma had become used to the want of privacy, and she was comforted by the presence of the sailors now. They were familiar to her, and she was glad they were there. They taught her knots and chanteys, and she cleaned their wounds and lanced their boils. Alma ate an albatross, shot by a young seaman. They passed the bloated, floating carcass of a whale—its blubber stripped away clean by other whalers—but they did not see any living whales.

The Pacific Ocean was vast and empty. Alma could understand now for the first time why it had taken the Europeans so long to find Terra Australis in this tremendous expanse. The early explorers had assumed there must be a southern continent as large as Europe someplace down here, in order to keep the planet perfectly balanced. But they had been wrong. There was little down here but water. If anything, the Southern Hemisphere was a reverse of Europe: it was a huge continent of ocean, dotted with tiny lakes of land spread very far apart, indeed.

Days upon days of blue emptiness followed. On every side, Alma saw prairies of water, as far as her mind could imagine. Still, they saw no whales. They saw no birds, either, but they could see weather coming from one hundred miles away, and it often looked bad. The air was voiceless until the storms came, and then the winds would shriek in distress.

In early April, they encountered a most alarming change of weather, which blackened the sky before their eyes, murdering the day in the middle of the afternoon. The air felt heavy and menacing. This sudden transformation worried Captain Terrence enough that he lowered the sails—all of them—as he watched chains of lightning come at them from all directions. The waves became rolling mountains of black. But then—as quickly as it had come upon them—the storm cleared, and skies grew light again. Instead of relief, though, the men cried out in alarm, for immediately they saw a waterspout drawing near. The captain ordered Alma belowdecks, but she would not move; the waterspout was too magnificent a sight. Then another cry went up, as the men realized there were, in point of fact, three waterspouts now surrounding the ship at distances much too close for comfort. Alma felt herself hypnotized. One of the spouts drew near enough that she could see the long strands of water spiraling upward from the ocean all the way into the sky, in one great swirling column. It was the most majestic thing she had ever seen, and the most holy, and the most awesome. The pressure in the air was so thick, Alma’s eardrums seemed in danger of bursting, and it was a struggle to pull breath into her lungs. For the next five minutes, she was so overcome that she did not know if she was alive or dead. She did not know what world this was. It struck Alma that her time in this world was over. Curiously, she did not mind. There was no one she longed for. Not a single soul she had ever known crossed her mind—not Ambrose, not anyone. She had no regrets. She stood in rapt amazement, prepared for anything that might occur.

After the waterspouts finally passed and the sea was tranquil once more, Alma felt it had been the happiest experience of her life.

They sailed on.

To the south, distant and impossible, was icy Antarctica. To the north was nothing, apparently—or so said the bored sailors. They kept sailing west. Alma missed the pleasures of walking and the smell of soil. With no other botany around to study, she asked the men to pull up seaweed for her to examine. She did not know her seaweeds well, but she knew how to distinguish things, one from the other, and she soon learned that some seaweeds had conglomerate roots, and some had compressed. Some were textured; some were smooth. She tried to puzzle out how to preserve the seaweeds for study, without turning them into slime or black flakes of nothingness. She never really mastered it, but it gave her something to do. She was also delighted to discover that the sailors packed their harpoon tips in wads of dried moss; this gave her something wonderful and familiar to examine again.

Alma came to admire sailors. She could not imagine how they endured such long periods of time away from the comforts of land. How did they not go mad? The ocean both stunned and disturbed her. Nothing had ever put more of an impression upon her being. It seemed to her the very distillation of matter, the very masterpiece of mysteries. One night they sailed through a diamond field of liquid phosphorescence. The ship churned up strange molecules of green and purple light as it moved, until it appeared that the Elliot was dragging a long glowing veil behind herself, wide across the sea. It was so beautiful that Alma wondered how the men did not throw themselves into the water, drawn down to their deaths by this intoxicating magic.

On other nights, when she could not sleep, she paced the deck in her bare feet, trying to toughen up her soles for Tahiti. She saw the long reflections of stars on the calm water, shining like torches. The sky above her was as unfamiliar as the sea around her. She saw a few constellations that reminded her of home—Orion, the Pleiades—but the northern pole star was gone, and the Great Bear, too. These missing treasures from the vault of the sky caused her to feel most desperately and helplessly disoriented. But there were new gifts to be seen in the heavens, as compensation. She could see the Cross of the South now, and the Twins, and the vast, spilling nebulae of the Milky Way.

Amazed by the constellations, Alma said to Captain Terrence one night, “Nihil astra praeter vidit et undas.”

“What does that mean?” he asked.

“It’s from the Odes of Horace,” she said. “It means there is nothing to be seen but stars and waves.”

“I’m afraid I don’t know Latin, Miss Whittaker,” he apologized. “I am not a Catholic.”

One of the older sailors, who had lived in the South Seas many years, told Alma that when the Tahitians picked a star to follow for navigation, they called it their aveia—their god of guidance. But in general, he said, the more common Tahitian word for a star was fetia. Mars was the red star, for instance: the fetia ura. The morning star was the fetia ao: the star of light. The Tahitians were extraordinary navigators, the sailor told her with undisguised admiration. They could navigate on a starless, moonless night, he said, reckoning themselves merely by the feel of the ocean’s current. They knew sixteen different kinds of wind.

“I always wondered if they ever went to visit us in the north, before we visited them in the south,” he said. “I wonder if they came up to Liverpool or Nantucket in their canoes. Could’ve done, you know. Could’ve sailed right up there and watched us while we slept, then paddled away before we saw them. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised to learn of it.”

So now Alma knew a few words of Tahitian. She knew star, and red, and light. She asked the sailor to teach her more. He offered what he could, trying to be helpful, but mostly he only knew the nautical terms, he apologized, and all the things you say to a pretty girl.

Still they saw no whales.

The men were disappointed. They were bored and restless. The seas were hunted to depletion. The captain feared bankruptcy. Some of the sailors—the ones that Alma had befriended, anyway—wanted to show off to her their hunting skills.

“It is such a thrill as you will never know,” they promised.

Every day they looked for whales. Alma looked, too. But she never did get to see one, for they landed in Tahiti in June of 1852. The sailors went one way and Alma went the other, and that was the last she ever heard of the Elliot.